


time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for

by silver_and_exact



Category: L.A. Quartet - James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Communication, Emotional Baggage, Fix-It, Gay Male Character, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internalized Homophobia, POV First Person, Pre-Slash, Queer Themes, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 10:00:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27968687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_and_exact/pseuds/silver_and_exact
Summary: Bucky looks for Lee immediately following their fight and Lee's disappearance, and gets clarification on a few things, some of which he didn't know needed clarifying.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

“I’m going to find Lee,” I said resolutely, and before I'd said it, I hadn't even been sure I was going to bother looking. 

Ever since that day in January when the two halves of Elizabeth Short had turned up at 39th and Norton, Lee Blanchard seemed to be doing his level best to acquaint me with whatever was fucking up his head and sticking him to this case like an animal in a claw trap. 

"I don't even know where he's gone," Kay protested, following me. "He could be anywhere."

"I'm a detective," I answered wryly, "I'll look for clues."

I walked past her, gathering up some of the stuff I'd left around the house. Spare articles of clothing, that sort of thing. More and more lately, I'd been staying over, sleeping on the couch. Playing house with the three of them, flirting with Kay while Lee was whistling a tune just a room away. I put on a pot of coffee and checked my watch; if I left LA in an hour or so - if I gave myself no time for second-guessing - I could make it to Tijuana by midnight. The stag film was my best lead, and TJ seemed as good a place as any to start looking for my partner. 

"You haven't known him as long as I have. He'll be back,” Kay said, then paused. “Please don't go.”

But I was halfway up the stairs, grabbing the extra toothbrush I kept in the bathroom. I realized that I had accumulated so many of my things in their house that stopping by my place likely wouldn’t be necessary, even if looking for Lee took more than a couple days, and the thought made me nostalgic and a little embarrassed. I’d been reeled in by a fantasy so completely that the potential problems with our arrangement hadn’t crossed my mind. What if it had hurt Lee, to see me insinuating myself into his life like this? What if his leaving had been as much a reaction to observing my flirtation with Kay over these past few months as it was to the pressures of the Dahlia case and De Witt’s release?

I’d been thinking of myself, more or less, and my own happiness, but it occurred to me now that Lee seemed to _want_ to be happy with Kay, but for whatever reason, he could never quite make it work. He’d risked his career to stay with her. Why had they never married? And why the hell had I never even asked? I supposed that ever since Kay had told me that Lee didn’t sleep with her, I’d been harboring this hope that he might not mind if I did. It was absurd, but up until now, I’d never felt parasitic, though I’d been viewing their house as a sort of… readymade domestic retreat, and thinking that it could be _mine_ , but if it was, where would my partner go? _To Mexico, probably to drink himself to death_ , I thought grimly. 

As I paced up and down the hallway, my foot caught on the raised edge of a floorboard, and I nearly fell on my face. I knelt down to inspect the off-kilter board—unusual, since the house really was perfect, at least in the sense that I’d never seen a thing out of place—and found that it didn’t take much force to pry it up. I uncovered a roll of money coiled like a cobra in the little hollow beneath it. 

Its presence sent a spike of nausea into my gut. Without Lee around to explain the money away as earnings from past fights—which became less and less likely with every additional nice thing he ascribed to savings and frugality—my mind grasped at explanations. I turned the cash over in my hands, wishing I could think of a single feasible reason why Lee had hidden it under his floor. A reason that was on the up-and-up, anyways, and preferably one that didn’t feel painfully naïve. 

When I came back downstairs, Kay was sitting at the dining room table, a cup of coffee clasped in her hands, her eyes focused somewhere within the woodgrain. She didn’t look at me when she spoke, and her voice was the voice of an actress reading lines for a part she didn’t really want.

“Lee planned the Boulevard-Citizens job.”

It wasn’t surprising—it explained the cash, the house, Kay’s master’s degrees and her endless rainbow of sweaters. But I hadn’t allowed myself to fully make the connection. She continued.

“One of those men you killed was involved. Fitch, his name was. He set you up, Dwight,” she said softly, and the sick feeling I'd started the conversation with threatened to overtake me.

Of course, it had occurred to me that I’d been… idealizing them. Lee and Kay. Putting it all in soft focus, low light, blur to cover the blemishes. And I knew that I’d been doing it. But I’d liked their story: Lee sweeping in and rescuing Kay from the gangsters and pimps, falling in love with her, risking his career for the sake of their innocent cohabitation. Was it their fault that they hadn't lived up to what I'd made them? 

It hurt, still. All the lies and the lies by omission. That the blood on my hands was a convenient way to solve a problem. 

“Maybe it’s not so bad, that he’s gone,” Kay murmured, fingers worrying at the hem of her skirt, her eyes avoiding mine. 

“Kay—” I said, reaching for her.

“Don’t,” she said, voice broken, brushing my hand from her arm, “You know, sometimes I got the feeling he couldn’t stand to look at me. He knew about the—all the things I did. Before. I told you we didn’t—he wouldn’t— But with you, well, maybe you know some of it, but you didn’t _see_. You weren’t there. We could—Dwight, we could make it work. It could be good. Just stay, alright? Please. For me.”

I stood in the doorway and thought it over, and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t tempting. Living in this house, Lee’s house, coming home to Kay, everything going back to something close to normal at the station in a few months when the whole business with the Dahlia inevitably fizzled out. When I got a new partner—maybe not a new best friend, but someone who wouldn't lose his mind and skip town. It’d be easy to do and hard to live with, but it could be done. 

I pulled the roll of c-notes from my jacket. Wondering if Kay already knew about it, why Lee hadn't taken it with him, if any of it mattered. 

“I found this under the floor upstairs. It’s all yours. If you want to go, I understand. But I’m finding Lee, and I’m bringing him back.” And god help me, I meant it. Lee Blanchard may have been a son of a bitch and a liar, but he was the best friend I’d ever had. I pressed the money into her hands, her eyes glossy with tears. 

“Goodbye, Dwight.”

I gave her a crooked smile.

“Maybe I’ll see you around.”

* * *

_Mr. Fire, you motherfucker,_ I thought, _I’m going to have to punch you one last time for making me turn that down_. 

I’d stopped by Lee’s room at the El Nido after leaving Kay behind, standing in the doorway clutching the money, her expression hardening. She was leaving—no question about it. I just hoped she’d be alright. I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been through, but I could guess, and just because she’d already seen the worst of it didn’t mean she deserved any more of the world’s misery. But I couldn’t do that for her. All I could do was bring more of the bad in. The case, Lee’s absence, all of it had set its poison into that perfect house, the enchanted world it sometimes felt we were on the precipice of building, and it would be slow, but eventually all of it would die. 

“He’s coming back. He’s coming back and we’re fixing this,” I said to a picture of Liz Short, feeling a little like I’d lost my mind but not caring. The Hollywood glamour shot, not the wall of close-ups of her cut-up face. I reached out to touch the photo before pulling my hand back, thinking better of it. She’d been touched enough.

I locked the room, made sure it was paid up for the month, and turned my car towards Mexico. 

* * *

I wasn’t sure how I made it down to Tijuana that night without the benefit of some of Lee’s Benzedrine, but I stopped at a diner for more coffee before I left L.A., and I was already wired. Goddamn if I didn’t miss the bastard. He was in trouble, and it wasn’t just the kind that involved money and men with guns. He’d been too focused on the Dahlia from the start, got the thing all crossed up with some personal crusade. A little bit of moral outrage was good in a cop, but conflating a dead sister with an active case you were working was a problem. 

But this—this felt like a case I could solve. I’d been spinning my wheels with the Short murder, each day trading more and more professional interest in favor of obsession, and it felt good, to look for Lee. 

And the more I asked around, the more confident I felt that finding Lee might be synonymous with saving his life. He’d blown a trail south boozing, throwing around ungodly sums of money, getting into fights. Drinking himself into a stupor on the top shelf stuff, flying off the handle. Crying in porno theaters. I paid off some Mex cops and got a tip that he’d holed up in Ensenada, and I leadfooted it down the coast, skimmed the neon-signed bars until one caught my eye. Club Boxeo. I went inside.

The lighting was harsh, all yellow and red, the walls papered with fight promos, Blanchard and Bleichert, side by side all the way across the border. It reminded me a little of Lee’s hotel room at the El Nido, Elizabeth Short staring down at me. Just a few more people whose promise was snuffed out, never-weres, almost-hads.

And then there he was, Lee Blanchard, a nearly-spent bottle of tequila clutched in one gigantic hand, sleepless circles under his eyes so dark they resembled bruises. A few new scars crisscrossed his face, probably my work, but I didn’t have it in me to feel bad at the moment. 

“Hey, partner,” I called bitterly, and he stood from his small table at the edge of the room, where he’d been staring dead-eyed at the dancing girls.

Maybe it was because he was drunk, maybe it was because he looked like he had no instinct for self-preservation left in him, but all it took was my right hook connecting with his cheekbone, my knuckles splitting, and he was down. After a moment, he sat up from the floor, dazed, and rubbed his cheek gingerly. I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to his feet. The girls kept on dancing.

“You’ve got a helluva right, kid,” said an old man with a fight-scarred face approvingly, and I smiled, tipping my hat and steering my partner toward the door. 

“Alright, you fucking drunk—what hotel are you staying in?” 

* * *

I shoved Lee into the backseat and followed his mumbled directions to a hotel called the Mariposa. When we got there, he shuffled unsteadily ahead of me like a death row inmate, taking a few tries to successfully unlock the door. 

The hotel room smelled like stale vomit, spilled drinks. It was clearly pricy, the best place the town had to offer, but none of that mattered when it was being used as the prelude to an early grave. Lee had run to Mexico thinking he was getting away from all of it, somehow. The Dahlia, our fight, the ramifications of his meltdown at La Vern’s Hideaway. The gradual unraveling of the Bleichert-Blanchard-Lake golden age.

At the moment, it was hard to picture the three of us, or even any combination of two of us, as anything other than irreparably shattered. As I stood surveying the chaotic wreckage of the hotel room, the liquor bottles—some of them broken, plainly after being thrown against the wall—and crumpled articles of clothing and banknotes strewn carelessly on the floor, I wondered if any of it could be salvaged. If we were any good for each other anymore, or if we could only bring up bad memories.

And of course, as I was suspecting the latter to be the more likely option, Lee went and made it all worse.

“I know who killed the Dahlia. I know who killed Beth Short,” he slurred, his eyes glassy and unfocused. He groped for one of the half-empty bottles strewn around the bed, and I kicked it out of his reach, feeling rage coiling white-hot through me.

“I sold her out, Bucky. Just like with… I’m not… I don’t deserve to go back there.” 

I swallowed my anger. I’d gotten my one punch in, and I’d promised myself I’d leave it at that.

“Yeah? Maybe you don’t. But that’s too bad, because I’m not letting you stay here.”

Looking at Lee under proper lighting, it struck me that he'd lost weight, and despite a slight sunburn, there was a sallow cast to his skin. Overall, he looked... malnourished, unwell. The word _suicidal_ rose unbidden in my thoughts, and horrified, I shook it off.

He reached for another bottle, and again, I kicked it away. Getting the picture, Lee lay flat on the floor, setting his jaw and staring at the ceiling, then closing his eyes.

“I didn’t—she wasn’t—I wasn’t with a girl. I lied to you.”

It was a non-sequitur. Not sure where he was going with this, I sighed.

“I get the feeling you lied to me a whole lot. It doesn’t matter. You’re coming back with me.”

“You wouldn’t want me to,” he said. I recognized the tone of voice. This faraway thing that was usually the precursor to a crying jag. 

“Yeah, yeah, you’re an asshole, you deserve to die down here, whatever you say. Come on. Get your shit together and let’s go.”

“When Laurie disappeared. I was with a guy.”

I raised an eyebrow. 

“So, what, you thought I’d be more impressed if you said that teenage Lee Blanchard was fucking some whore?” It came out harsher than I’d expected it to, but what a fucking stupid thing to lie about. He lifted his head from the floor and looked me in the eye, then.

“I mean I was sucking his dick.”

All the sound left the room. I could feel the sand and dirt on my skin as individual grains, my heart freefalling into the pit of my stomach. Even after everything, I wasn’t expecting this. Sure, I’d been a little curious about Lee and Kay’s oddly pure relationship, but I’d chalked it up to some kind of chivalry at best, Lee believing that Kay was damaged goods at worst. And far more bizarre things were always happening in Los Angeles. A girl had been cut in half, drained of blood, posed like a doll. So a man and a woman weren’t fucking. It was hardly front-page stuff. Hardly the crime of the century. 

And maybe I had ideas about what men who did things like what Lee had just copped to were about, how they’d act, the giveaways to look out for. I guess I’d always figured that I’d _know_ , somehow. 

Lee maintained eye contact with me for a moment, daring me to break it. He picked himself off of the floor and crossed the room, only a slight unsteadiness in his gait betraying how drunk he was. He defiantly picked up one of the bottles I’d kicked across the floor and took a long drink, and when he next spoke, his voice was calm. 

“Now tell me how bad you want to drive me back to L.A.”

I realized I’d been holding my breath, my pulse drilling its staccato throb into my ears. I exhaled, harsh, and said resolutely,

“I want to drive you back to L.A.”

* * *

We stayed at the hotel for a night. Neither of us were in any state to make the drive back to Los Angeles. I picked up all the bottles, mechanically emptying them into the dirty bathroom sink, and Lee slept on the floor. As I lay on the bed, his voice filtered up from the ground below me and told me everything he knew about the Spragues, Georgie Tilden, Emmett and the 100k, then circled back to the De Witt frame job, Kay, Bugsy Siegel, all of it expelled in a monotone torrent of resignation and relief. Part of me wanted to throw the sheets aside, drag him up from the floor and pummel his lights out, and I was pretty sure I’d win this one—I was in better shape. But he’d finally told me everything, and I didn’t think I was lying to myself, believing that. Things weren’t the same, but we were square. 

Sometime in the night, I heard the floorboards creaking outside the door and reached for my .38, feeling the presence as it lingered for a few minutes, the echo of a woman’s stilettos retreating back down the hallway and down the stairs. 

The next morning, I swiped the bottle of Benzedrine from Lee’s hand and flushed the pills, marched him to the tourist end of town for breakfast and as much coffee as we could stomach, and we hit the road. 

* * *

“You know, Kay thinks it was about her. Why you wouldn’t… why you never…”

We'd been driving for a while in silence, which, while not exactly what I'd call "companionable," wasn't entirely uncomfortable. Apparently I was set to change that for the worse with my chosen topic.

“Why I never fucked her?” finished Lee, and it felt sacrilegious, almost. Whatever we’d had going on, the three of us, the perfection of it, it didn’t have room for vulgarity. You just didn’t talk about Kay like that, and I said as much. He grinned. 

“You’re such a prince, Bleichert. How you ever made it into the LAPD and stuck around for more than a few days is a real question for the ages.”

“I’ve done my share of things I’m not happy about,” I said levelly, eyes on the road. He didn’t ask me to elaborate. I thought about my friends in the internment camps, about the sheer number of times I’d imagined killing my father. 

The silence stretched on, the landscape outside the car repetitive, all sand and rocks. A dead armadillo haloed with flies.

“Back when you were a fighter—what did you do? When they threw a girl your way at the end of the night, I mean?” I said awkwardly. I’d been thinking about this; there’d be no way around it. It was as much a part of the fight as the fight itself. _Barbaric_ , my mind supplied, and I grimaced. Maybe I _was_ being puritanical. 

“I fucked them,” the other man said nonchalantly. 

“So you—” _can be normal_ almost escaped my mouth. You don’t have to be a fairy, queer, whatever. But calling Lee any of these things felt wrong. Again, the feeling of sacrilege, blasphemy, whatever. So Lee Blanchard wasn’t quite who or what I’d thought. But I’d made all of that shit up, because I’d _liked_ him and wanted a better reason for the feeling than instinct. I still liked him, pixie bank robber or no. So I let the potential judgments hang in the air, dissipate. 

“No, I didn’t want to,” Lee filled in the silence, rueful, “But I _can_. And it was a hell of a lot easier than not fucking them would’ve been.”

“It wasn’t easy, ever,” I admitted, allowing some of my high-minded bullshit to crawl out into the light, “not really,” I followed lamely. I’d never told anyone about this because of how it might sound. 

Lee looked at me strangely. “Seemed like it was easy enough for most guys.”

“I don’t know. You spend ten rounds trying to hurt someone, you start to get the feeling you’ll hurt the next person you touch, too. One girl… she’d been watching the fight, said she liked me. She was a virgin—I didn’t know—and the blood…” I’d been a little concussed, and for a split second I thought I’d killed her somehow. I still had dreams about it. 

“Christ,” Lee muttered.

I made a sound of agreement. “She didn’t deserve that. Something like me. So the guys who nudged her my way could ask me about it later and laugh.”

Years later, and all I could remember was the blood. I didn’t have her name, her face. Just a vague impression of the backseat of my old car, and pale thighs smudged with red. 

“I wanted you two to get together. You and Kay. She was in love with you, you know,” Lee said, looking out the window. “Why didn’t you?”

We’d never talked about it—the dynamic between the three of us. Talking about it felt dangerous. Like it could break a spell. To put it into words would be a kind of violence. The simple truth was that I loved them. Loved what they had, the idea of it, loved being a part of it, even as an orbiting object. 

“Everything’s been feeling like the end of a fight,” I said, piecing it together as I spoke, “Since our matchup. Hell, since before then. It wouldn’t have been right.”

“Yeah," said Lee, "I'm sorry."

And despite everything, I believed him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, i am still writing this, though slowly. i know how it ends, but i have to connect what i've got together.

Lee had known that the Spragues would take me down with them, and he didn’t think he could do much about it. He knew about Madeleine and me—he’d tailed my brass girl as she ran home from the Red Arrow to cling to her daddy. 

She wasn’t the Dahlia. Hell, the Dahlia was barely the Dahlia. It was all bullshit, and Madeline was just some warped rich girl fucking around on her lover-father to cover the tracks her family had made in blood all over Los Angeles, Elizabeth Short a dime-a-dozen Hollywood hopeful turning tricks, heartbreakingly common, only something special after she’d been cut up and left out in the grass. 

But it was one thing to know this. It had burrowed in me so deep, the rest of the not-knowing, the newspaper innuendo of a black-clad temptress succumbing to the same danger she’d thumbed her nose at. It was a story within a story, and to know one part was untrue only made the rest more powerful, only opened up the door to another story, and the beauty of the whole thing was that you never had to stop opening doors. 

I persuaded Lee to tell Russ Millard the whole tale after I’d gotten the man to agree to a kind of unofficial immunity for both of us. But only after I’d agreed to tell my part, obstruction and withholding evidence and all. I banked on the padre just wanting to know what had really happened. To close it up for good, if only in his own mind, because what Lee and I had admitted to would amount to a full-scale departmental scandal if it ever came out. Probably the worst scandal to date, and that was saying a lot. 

He gave us one of his long-suffering saintly looks as we stood in his office, looking like hell had thrown us out. The unhealthy pallor of Lee’s face was offset by a significant black eye, and I was wearing the same suit I’d left town in. Even though I’d brought a change of clothes, it had just seemed more apropos to look like shit, to match the way I felt. 

Russ sighed as Lee wrapped up his story, and gestured between us both.

“You,” he pointed, “are never telling _anyone_ what you’ve just told me. Do you understand? It stays in this room.”

We nodded mutely; shame curled beneath my skin, and I imagined Lee was feeling something similar. Millard had a knack for making me feel like I was in the principal’s office, with his not-angry-just-disappointed paternal stare that I’d never experienced from my own father, whose variation on the silent treatment generally included a backhand, when he was actually around to dole one out. 

“Now I want you to get a line on the vacant properties owned by Sprague, check them out. Tilden’s probably staying in one of them, and there’s bound to be something in there we can pick him up on, Elizabeth Short-related or no. You’re both suspended. This is off the books—try not to fuck this up any more than you already have.” He paused. “And Bleichert?”

I forced myself to look up from the floor, my shoes still dusted beige with Mexican sand. 

“Be a bright penny and look out for your partner; he’s no good for himself.”

* * *

It took all day and most of the night checking houses before we got to anywhere worth staying. Silverlake’s meandering streets were pleasant and borderline whimsical in daylight, but by nightfall, the seclusion took on more sinister undertones, the suburban greenery extending outward to throttle any light that might give away their secrets. But I was being fanciful, jumpy from lack of sleep and anticipation of what Georgie might have in store for us if we found whatever hole he was hiding in. And to be honest, I was worried that I’d fuck up at looking out for Lee like the padre had asked me to. Or more likely, that we’d both fucked it up a while back, and every minute that passed since I’d dragged my partner back across the border was borrowed time. 

I stole a glance his way as he turned the car in the direction of the fourth house on our list. Lee’s eyes locked intently on the address numbers, guilt propelling him better than any amphetamines ever could’ve. Millard had promised he’d do what he could to save our jobs ( _“For some reason I still think you two could make damned fine detectives,_ ”) and attributed our mutual suspensions to Lee’s blowup at La Verne’s and the fact that I’d beaten my partner bloody while on the clock. And even though I’d cut Lee’s disappearance short, it had still happened, and I’d pissed off Ellis Loew by siding with the padre over Fritzie and the rest one too many times. If worst came to worst, Lee was peeling more than a couple c-notes off of his extortion roll and throwing them my way—he’d gotten me into this, after all, with his hard-on for the Dahlia case, and then he’d thrown the whole mess in my lap and booked it. 

But I couldn’t bring myself to be that mad at him, somehow. Mostly I was glad to have him back, glad to be sitting in the passenger seat while he prowled the car down the winding avenues, searching for a necrophile and a killer. It felt right, being partners again. I didn’t believe in much, but ever since we’d met back in ’43, I caught myself thinking of our partnership as an inevitability, as whatever passed for fate when it came to two washed-up fighters. 

We pulled up to the fourth house, small and unassuming at the end of a cul-de-sac, and a prickle ran down my spine as I observed that the curtains were shut drum-tight. A glance Lee’s way told me that he’d noticed the same, and he drew his .38 as I rang the buzzer, jimmied the lock with the teeth of my handcuffs. 

The door swung open with minimal effort, and neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight, but the faint light that issued from the streetlamps outside illuminated the place enough that I found a light switch without much trouble. The house was musty, and there was an iodine smell, a smell of formaldehyde and unwashed bedsheets choking the air, particles of dust and nameless filth suspended and lending the whole place the appearance of a grainy old film. I unholstered my gun and headed in the direction from which the chemical odor seemed to be issuing, Lee following close behind. 

The acrid medicinal stench grew overpowering as we approached the back of the building and entered a space that, in a normal house, would’ve been a dining room. I flicked another switch, and all at once the room was starkly illuminated, and Georgie Tilden was staying here, alright. And the formaldehyde smell made a lot of sense.

“Goddamn,” Lee breathed, and we took it all in. 

Shelves lined the walls, all of them neatly lined with jarred organs, segments of flesh, unidentified clots of viscera. There was an apocalyptic order to all of it, like the symmetry of a bomb crater. I tried not to look too closely and focused on the center of the room, which was occupied by a semen-stained mattress and blanket surrounded by stacks of notebooks. I grabbed the nearest one and cracked it open, fighting off a dry-heave, and as luck would have it, I’d picked up a diary from ’47, though it was more likely that it was less luck and more that it was kept close to hand, a treasured relic, a firsthand account of a now-famous killing.

The small, orderly print spelled out Liz Short’s last days in no uncertain detail, at times clinical and at times borderline erotic. I felt the prickle of something hysterical beginning to metastasize in me, starting in my stomach and working its way up my throat, and I did my best to tamp it down. I closed the journal with finality, tucked it under my arm and looked around for Lee.

And I saw that Lee had frozen in place, his expression stricken, rapidly closing over, going flat. My eyes followed his line of sight until I saw what had stopped him. 

A hand, smaller than an adult’s, suspended in viscous fluid on an eye-level shelf. A hand maybe belonging to a little girl. Maybe about the size Laurie Blanchard’s hand would’ve been around the time she’d disappeared.

I knew that the chances of it actually being Lee’s sister’s hand were slim, and I knew that Lee knew. There must have been cuttings from dozens if not hundreds of corpses in the room, one jar alone holding enough teeth to fill twenty-odd mouths, fingers and eyes and tongues of all sizes. An excised segment of a jaw, the lower lip still intact, a tuft of facial hair clinging to the remaining skin before dropping off to a ragged bloodless interior of meat. If you looked at the jars for long enough, you were bound to notice something that would have you drawing connections to your own life, to your past. I supposed that made it a good collection. I wanted to pass out. I wanted to kill something with my hands. 

“Lee,” I said lowly, but he didn’t budge, save to extend his fingers to touch the glass jar, startling back upon contact as if he’d half believed it to be imaginary. 

“Lee, we have to—”

And then a board creaked, close, and everything went to hell.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "All My Pretty Ones" by Anne Sexton. 
> 
> I've written another section of this story which is slashy & smutty, but I haven't managed to interconnect the two since I need to figure out how Lee's presence would change what happens with Georgie Tilden and the Spragues, and all the other moving parts of the novel. I guess I could just ignore them (pretty sure there are some things I completely elided over already, like De Witt's murder), but that feels like cheating somehow.
> 
> Maybe I will get around to this eventually? The pandemic is ruining my brain and making it borderline impossible to string thoughts together. Either way, I felt like posting what I'd written since this is another borderline-nonexistent fandom for me to insinuate myself into.


End file.
